Book Image

Improving your Penetration Testing Skills

By : Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari, Daniel Teixeira, Abhinav Singh
Book Image

Improving your Penetration Testing Skills

By: Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari, Daniel Teixeira, Abhinav Singh

Overview of this book

Penetration testing (or ethical hacking) is a legal and foolproof way to identify vulnerabilities in your system. With thorough penetration testing, you can secure your system against the majority of threats. This Learning Path starts with an in-depth explanation of what hacking and penetration testing are. You’ll gain a deep understanding of classical SQL and command injection flaws, and discover ways to exploit these flaws to secure your system. You'll also learn how to create and customize payloads to evade antivirus software and bypass an organization's defenses. Whether it’s exploiting server vulnerabilities and attacking client systems, or compromising mobile phones and installing backdoors, this Learning Path will guide you through all this and more to strengthen your defense against online attacks. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll have the knowledge and skills you need to invade a system and identify all its vulnerabilities. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books: • Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition by Juned Ahmed Ansari and Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez • Metasploit Penetration Testing Cookbook - Third Edition by Abhinav Singh , Monika Agarwal, et al.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page

Kali Linux

Kali Linux is a security-focused Linux distribution based on Debian. It's a rebranded version of the famous Linux distribution known as BackTrack, which came with a huge repository of open source hacking tools for network, wireless, and web application penetration testing.

Although Kali Linux contains most of the tools of BackTrack, the main objective of Kali Linux was to make it portable to be installed on devices based on ARM architectures, such as tablets and the Chromebook, which makes the tools easily available at your disposal.

Using open source hacking tools comes with a major drawback—they contain a whole lot of dependencies when installed on Linux, and they need to be installed in a predefined sequence. Moreover, the authors of some tools have not released accurate documentation, which makes our life difficult.

Kali Linux simplifies this process...